§ 30 Health warning: everything can be found beautiful!

That everything can be found beautiful is a critical challenge.¹

Beauty can be found everywhere because we have to assume that our universe is a single, coherent, and consistent system. It is perfect in its working and therefore beautiful.

Beauty can be found wherever the word ‘fit’ can be used in a conceptually appropriate way, and thus it can be found everywhere. In our universe, everything that can be conceived can be assumed to fit perfectly in that universe. It is that simple. Such a thing will have a role and will fit with other things that can be conceived, and so beauty may be assumed to be everywhere for the taking.

The only condition is that it must be found conceptually, either implicitly or explicitly.

Artists, writers, mathematicians, and scientists make beauty explicit by opening up the world conceptually as a whole with its working parts. The rest of us may not know how to capture and express the beauty in their images and descriptions, but may nevertheless feel that beauty arise in them during conceptual play.

Beauty can also be found in the dark sides of humanity. And this is where it gets worrying. Because everything can be found to fit with some set of ideas from some perspective, the experience of beauty is more or less forced to become a social matter, subject to virtue and norms.

It becomes our social duty to critically assess our tastes and take a moral stance regarding them. Some forms of beauty are destructive to the environment, society, or relationships between people. Critique is needed to determine the usefulness and desirability of experiences of beauty and to judge them as good or bad from some perspective.

A common perspective is that of ‘traditional values and norms’, and there is something to be said for those, but they do need tending. I personally prefer the perspective of flourishing, and that is the perspective I have committed myself to.

At the same time, we can see that societies and other ecologies are dynamic; they can change. Societies can change their concerns, their catalogue of ideological attitudes. Societal processes can alter our attitudes to slavery, women, race, skin colour, sexuality, gender and ‘minorities’, the environment, etc.

The constellation of taboos that holds a society together can shift and change our behaviour, and thus our conceptualisation of the world, producing new realities through the effects of our adjusted behaviour.

Because beauty can be found in anything if looked at in the right way, it can find harmonies and so help to discover potential truths and instances of the good. Not only can everything be found beautiful if it fits somewhere, but there are also infinite methods to make something fit.

As harmony satisfies, a judgment of beauty discovers potential truths and potential goods, which it then helps nudge to the other side. It helps nudge whatever is judged true toward the good, and vice versa.

© jacob voorthuis, 2026. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.

1. A slightly older version of this paragraph was first published in Jacob Voorthuis, Theoria, use, intention & design, a philosophical reckoning; Analysis & Critique: Gardening in the metaphysics of the beautiful, the true, and the good, AHT, TU/e (2024) ↩︎